The network infrastructure in a datacenter devoted to cloud computing. Cloud networking interconnects all servers and storage systems. In huge datacenters, the traffic is not just to and from the external world (north-south) but also within the datacenter (east-west) in order to retrieve all elements that make up today's complex Web pages. A robust, switched network infrastructure is required to support such datacenters with tens of thousands of servers.
Arista Networks, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, which is known for its family of highly scalable Ethernet switch products, coined the term cloud networking to refer to this north-south plus east-west I/O infrastructure requirement. See
I/O virtualization.